Mazur v Charles Russell Speechlys LLP [2025] EWHC 2341 (KB) raises whether the Legal Services Act 2007 genuinely altered the boundaries of who may conduct litigation. The judgment suggests solicitors cannot delegate that function, but historical and structural arguments undermine this view. First, the right to conduct litigation evolved through centuries of statutory consolidation, and the 2007 Act arguably restricted rather than liberalised it. Second, modern regulation emphasises entity authorisation: firms, including limited companies, are empowered to conduct litigation through human agents. As the SRA’s rules define “person” to include bodies corporate, the Act’s interpretation in Mazur may not withstand scrutiny. Further litigation seems inevitable.
One of the more intriguing questions thrown up by Mazur v Charles Russell Speechlys LLP [2025] EWHC 2341 (KB) is whether it is simply wrong: that the Legal Services Act 2007 did not create a sea change in the practice of the solicitors profession and a solicitor or a solicitors’ firm may lawfully delegate the conduct of litigation.
There are two lines of argument that immediately spring to mind to cast doubt on the interpretation of the Legal Services Act 2007 adopted in Mazur: the historical evolution of rights to conduct litigation, and the role played by entity authorisation.
The arguments on the first issue, are both intricate and obscure. They involve the history of the right to conduct litigation. In order to trace the evolution of regulated rights to conduct litigation one must go back, and back to the appearance of the legal profession in the thirteenth century, and then follow the golden thread through the Attorneys and Solicitors Act 1729.
The Solicitors Act of 1843 was a consolidating statute, and followed in turn by Acts in 1932 and 1957, before we reach the first of the modern statutes the Solicitors Act 1974 and then the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990.
In order to understand the rights regulated under these statutes, one must understand the history of the legal profession and then decide whether the Legal Services Act 2007 removed historical rights, or more accurately increased restrictions on the right to conduct litigation instead of liberalising it.
Secondly and alternatively one can look at the regulation of the modern profession under the Legal Services Act 2007 and the SRA and its STARS: most of the focus of regulation these days, is through regulation of entities, including limited companies. Limited companies can be authorised to conduct litigation.
It may be stating the obvious, but a limited company has no head, body, legs or arms. It can only act through human beings who live, breathe, wield pens and press computer keys. Note also that although the SRA Authorisation of Firms Rules provides as follows in rule 5.5:
An authorised body may only carry on a reserved legal activity through a person who is entitled to do so.
that “person” is further defined to include a body of persons (corporate or unincorporated).
So does the current scheme of regulation indeed provide that firms must both be authorised to conduct litigation, and can only do so, through authorised individual human beings? Or is another interpretation possible?
I suspect that these arguments will be tested very soon.